Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to ways to share content, more particularly, to sharing media content across television and a plurality of mobile devices.
Description of the Related Art
Television has been around for a number of years. However, television watching has evolved over the years. Watching television is a highly social experience with people physically gathering around the television for viewing major televised event, news, etc. Increasing number of users are bringing their mobile devices with them when gathering around to watch the television. Oftentimes, these users use their mobile devices while watching television, to consume content, which may or may not be related to the program being viewed by the group that is gathered together, to check email or social media updates, thereby shifting their attention away from the television. Such shift in attention by some users would cause other user(s) to have alone experiences even when these users are in the same room.
In other cases, users who traditionally have physically come together for viewing major events may not be able to do so due to social or professional commitment of some of the participating users. Additionally, a lot of content relating to the program being watched, exists on the Internet that is professionally curated or user generated and it would be advantageous to be able to view such content simultaneously while watching the program to enhance a user's TV viewing experience. It would advantageous to find ways to get the users that are co-located to enjoy watching the television together and for users that are not co-located, to bring the users virtually together to enable the non-co-located users share their television watching together, so as to keep their television (TV) watching traditions alive while enriching their TV watching experience.
Conventional TV allowed a user to watch one event at any given time. Later enhancements to the TV allowed users to watch more than one channel by engaging picture-in-picture capability built into the television. However, such capabilities compromise the TV viewing experience of some users (those that are able to watch the show in a smaller portion of the TV screen) while enhancing the viewing experience of other users (those that are able to watch the event in the main portion of the TV screen). It would be advantageous to allow the users to be able to control the content rendering on the main portion and be able to swap the content with other event content or to allow the users to curate the content for watching together.
It is in this context that the embodiments of the invention arise.